World War I was supposed to be the "war to end all wars," yet nations around the globe were sucked into the tempest and millions of men died on the battlefields, in what remains one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage. Here the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Award winner Bury the Chains focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's critics, many of whom were thrown in jail for their dissent, from a future Nobel Prize winner to an editor who distributed a clandestine prison newspaper on toilet paper.

"This is the kind of investigatory history [Adam] Hochschild pulls off like no one else.... Hochschild is a master at chronicling how prevailing cultural opinion is formed and, less frequently, how it's challenged."—Fresh Air (NPR)

"WWI remains the quintessential war—unequaled in concentrated slaughter, patriotic fervor during the fighting, and bitter disillusion afterward, writes Hochschild. Many opposed it and historians mention this in passing, but Hochschild ... has written an original, engrossing account that gives the war's opponents (largely English) prominent place.... Except for Bertrand Russell, famous opponents are scarce because most supported the war. Hochschild vividly evokes the jingoism of even such leading men of letters as Kipling, Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. By contrast, Hochschild paints equally vivid, painful portraits of now obscure civilians and soldiers who waged a bitter, often heroic, and, Hochschild admits, unsuccessful antiwar struggle."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)